American Bureaucracy in an Age of Oligarchy
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2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. Recent scholarship on the emergence of oligarchic trends in American politics focuses on the effect of the concentration of wealth on distributions of power in electoral politics. In this literature, the authors make claims that oligarchic organization of power will have multiple and far-reaching consequences for the organization of political institutions. In this article, we examine some hypothetical consequences for American federal bureaucracy, specifically bureaucratic control, under conditions of civil oligarchy. We focus on the challenges to the arrangement of bureaucratic control institutions that oligarchic concentrations of wealth might present. We demonstrate these challenges argumentatively and graphically.